Hahaha, I built something just like this site once, just to see what would happen.

Wouldn't this be fun? No auth, no rules, no permanent database, just plain text that hangs out for a while (though people could reply to it - ours was more like a forum). The ones with replies jump to the top, everything else slowly falls off into the abyss where it can never be found again.

Literally had people posting ASCII-rendered child pornography within 24 hours

Apart from the last line, that site design sounds like a lot of fun. I'm guessing you went "okay this isn't going to work" and killed it - or is it still quietly buried somewhere?

Also, did you keep the code? Might be a fun startpoint for others to springboard off of.

> Apart from the last line, that site design sounds like a lot of fun

"Other than that, how did you enjoy the play, Mrs. Lincoln?" :)

Nah the code is gone. Wrote it in <24 hours, and it wasn't really worth keeping.

Hehe. Gotcha. Thanks for the reply!

So, like 4chan but without images?

ya pretty much

We (and by we, I mean, I) launched "Oh By"[1] last year which is very, very much like what is going on here, but with deliberately human-readable and recognizable codes ("Oh By Codes") ....

Do you have any comments ?

Of course we had pastebin very much in mind - not as a model to follow but as an analogous service in some ways. Our message is limited to 4096 characters so it isn't quite as useful for large docs ... but it's much easier to pass around the "code" chalked on the street ...

[1] https://0x.co

That's interesting. I am surprised I didn't see the mention of this last year.

This is genius. I love it.

Have you ever done an AMA? I imagine that would be interesting..

I don't think I have that many interesting stories, it was just the time involved with dealing with emails from irate individuals, companies, and (occasionally) law enforcement agencies!

But in an AMA, it's the audience that asks interesting questions, with you discovering that your stories are more interesting than you originally thought they would be!

Honestly what I'd love to know is how you scaled it and how you would/wouldn't scale it again.

Still would be interesting, pastebin probably had almost every user-type imaginable.

I was trawling through /bestcomments, saw your comment extracted on its own, and opened this thread to suggest you share some life stories.

And then I see others have requested AMAs too.

pastebin is, after all, the #1 site. And you did (more or less) say you stopped running it due to stress/"interestingness" :)

Like another commentator said, you would've gotten one of everything.

So please do consider it. :)

Ditto. Those who ignore history etc

God i feel you. Everytime a pastebin close we get a surge of dox / warez / child porn activity on http://0bin.net. Since by design we can't monitor it we just get notified after the fact by concerned citizens mailing us. One month our mailbox is empty, the other one it's report day every day.

How confident are you in your legal shield that, although you know your service is being used for child porn, you're claiming not to be responsible for it?

Edit: I see you're behind whoisguard but hosted in Bulgaria, which is probably uninterested enough in chasing you.

Oh cool I'd not heard of this before but it looks awesome. Good work

they will most likely get spam first, as they allow links. from those seo people

If they're not indexed then I can't see the value.

That assumes all of the spammers care enough to learn the limitations of txt.fyi.

Some will just scribble whatever, where-ever possible.

I can confirm that. I made https://pastery.net, a pastebin (THE BEST ONE), and I looked a few weeks later to find that it had a few hundred thousand pastes. I was very happy to see that people were using it that much, until I realized that most of it was spam.

I wrote some heuristics to delete spam pastes, and only about 1,000 pastes were left, about half of which were spam still :(

I don't even know why they do this. They just do it.

Require some complex js codes workflow to post using websocket or something and most automated spam goes away. They are mass mindless bot, not targeted spammers.

That's a good idea, but most of the functionality of the site comes from its API. Then again, it's easy to require a key and a captcha to sign up, so your idea is good, thank you.

Cheaper for their scripts to indiscriminately spam than them manually work out which forms and public sites are indexed and will actually bring them value.

YOu just gave them a lab to play test in.

it happened to something similar i did many moons ago , even with nofollow. i dont know why

Nofollow links seem to help with getting the target indexed. So, the spammers create their second and third tiers of actual content on sites that do not use nofollow. However, they'll use anything with any kind of links to get those tiers crawled and indexed.

i guess thats what they did. funny, it seems they got penalized regardless somehow, because i started getting emails asking to please remove the spam they posted.

Edit: It seems some of them were trying to damage competitor's SEO ranking by posting irregular links. SEO is wild west.

Thankfully the old "blasting links" type of SEO is pretty much dead now.

When you say something similar do you mean also not indexed, or do you mean you ran a text submission site with nofollow links?

nofollow, but indexed

I'm not convinced that nofollow == no value.

Isn't that easy to deal with? Sit back, relax and wait for a court order or your own ISP's demand kind of thing?

That's been my policy when running this kind of thing in the past - maybe I've been living behind CloudFlare and OVH for too long.

The internet is horrifying.

The internet reveals the horrifying nature of humanity.

*of the worst of technically literate humanity.

If you're implying that the technically literate are either better or worse in this respect (or even just differently distributed), you might want to back that up with some arguments. Maybe you tried to say something else but otherwise I don't see the point of this remark.

No, I'm highlighting that nicky0's phrasing over-generalises.